Behind the scenes of Dungeon Siege
Nowadays you can’t swing a +3 long sword of discombobulation without hitting an action RPG. Representing part of a crucial middle step between the RPGs of old (or should that be olde) and the energetic extravaganzas of today, games™ discovers the origins of this first story of Ehb…
By the late Nineties, PC RPGs, despite remaining popular, had not broken into the console market, with game pads often in particular considered inadequate for the complex controls required. Gamers were changing, however; the visceral, instant thrills of PlayStation 2 and Xbox software were infecting the PC world. Naturally, there would still be plenty of scope for complex simulations and in-depth strategy titles; but it was clear there was room for something else. Something less intense. Something more exciting. Something instantly accessible, that didn’t require the assimilation of a complex set of rules just to avoid getting decapitated by the first wandering monster you bumped into.
In 1997, Cavedog Entertainment released Total Annihilation, an RTS game that swiftly became a hit among critics and fans. Designed by Chris Taylor [see games™ 132], Total Annihilation shrugged off its ‘Command & Conquer clone’ tag, presenting a significantly upgraded approach to the genre. However, with Cavedog understandably keen to maximise its profits from the game, Taylor decided to do what he had already considered prior to joining the developer, and form his own studio: Gas Powered Games. “We wanted to try our hand at something different,” he begins, “And although this logic is probably confounding today, as developers often stick to a single genre, back then it wasn’t a strange thing to do.”
After finishing Total Annihilation, Taylor had already begun brainstorming his next project with the idea to do something ‘really fun and interesting’. As early as April 1998 ideas for games were being discussed with friends at his house; by May, Gas Powered Games had been formed and a few months later, offices were acquired. Given Taylor had just started this new company, Dungeon Siege’s team unsurprisingly began small. “But by the end we had well over 40 people,” he says, “although the average was probably closer to 30 throughout development.” Many of the team had worked with Taylor on Total Annihilation, including Jeremy Soule, the man responsible for its outstanding and imperious score.
In terms of influences, there are several for Dungeon Siege. Even its creator would admit it’s not the most original game in the world. But Taylor cites one in particular. “I would name Diablo as the single biggest influence. I loved that game but I found it had so many quirks, especially the long loading times. So I wanted to make something that would fully-immerse the player into the world.” Taylor admits that many other RPGs of the time such as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and the latter Ultima games all entered into the mix. Neal Hallford, who worked with Cavedog on the aborted fantasy adventure Elysium, got to know Chris Taylor as his office was adjacent to Elysium designer John Cutter’s.
“I seem to recall helping brush up a description of Total Annihilation for the marketing department,” recalls Hallford, “But that game was all Chris really. I then heard about Dungeon Siege when he started Gas Powered Games and he asked me if I might be willing to help with the story.” Hallford concurs with Taylor and names Diablo as the single biggest influence on Dungeon Siege. “Diablo definitely had the greatest bearing. He wanted a game that concentrated on action and about having an experience that you could just pick up and play
writemyessayservice.co.uk without spending 20 hours researching character classes, which was something Diablo really streamlined.”
Dungeon Siege took this further, allowing the player to simply select a character type before jumping into the game and developing their class as they progressed. “I think it was a very revolutionary idea, for the time,” confirms Hallford, “but then Dungeon Siege was one of the most unusual gigs I’ve ever worked on.” Normally the experienced designer would work with a blank canvas for his world and a license to create whatever he wanted. “With Dungeon Siege, however, Chris contacted me once the project was already well under way, and he by then had a few stakes set in the ground.” Taylor had already created much of the Kingdom of Ehb, where the action would take place, and the enemies, the Seck. “He also knew where it was going to start and end,” continues Hallford, “but beyond that he just had a sequence of events with monsters and items. What he didn’t have, was a why.” These questions included why were these bad things happening, and who were the Seck?
Dungeon Siege had a technical basis and a skeleton of a story, but no meat and bones. “So I sat down and threaded the levels together,” says Hallford, “with a story that made sense, creating dialogues, backgrounds and backed it all up with a huge world bible that provided all the rationales for how the world was.” In some ways, Hallford’s imagination ran a little over, creating more backstory than the player would ever be able to digest. But it all added depth to the game, and gave players a richer experience. “All the hard work and heavy lifting was Neal,” says Taylor. “I had some specific ideas about the origin of the story and world – Neal worked with these ideas and developed the entire fictional universe from that. It was fun for me to come up with names and places and then watch him masterfully weave those into the fiction.”
On the technical side, Dungeon Siege would use its own bespoke engine. “It was different back then,” says Taylor, “as most developers would create their own engine. Even though we might have been able to modify a first-person shooter engine, we were fairly certain that we couldn’t do the things we wanted to do with the continuously streaming world if we didn’t develop our own engine.” The continuous streaming that Taylor mentions remains something of a novelty even today, and proved to be the biggest single stumbling block in Dungeon Siege’s development.
“It was node-based technology – meaning that the entire world was built out of building blocks that would all fit together,” explains Taylor. The effect was a complete lack of loading screens and transitions as the player explored Ehb – walls of buildings and caves would simply melt away when the player entered them, creating a seamless playing experience, unseen at the time. “We ran into all kinds of crazy problems with it… But in the end we got it all sorted out and it worked beautifully. And even better, we created these impossible worlds to allow the player to teleport from one place to another, because you could attach and sort-of loop these nodes together. It was like we created five dimensional space.”
Hallford recalls, “One of the things I loved and respected about Chris is that he’s a hard-core techhead. He’s always about advancing the technology under the hood as well as making a game that’s fun to play. Dungeon Siege was no exception, and the first time he showed me the game with no level loads, my jaw hit the floor; it was absolutely incredible, one big, beautiful, seamless experience.” Another ground-breaking implementation was the extreme zoom in (and above) option that permitted the player to really feel they were stepping into the action. “I’m a big fan of that, and this was essential for not only allowing the player to zoom in and see the detail, but also zoom out to survey the battle when multiple characters were slugging it out.” notes Taylor. However, given the concept and style of play, a larger party of directly player-controlled characters was soon abandoned. “As much as I am influenced by other games, I take pride in doing it differently. We always took a look at competitor’s games and asked ourselves what we like about them, but in the end we wanted to create our own experience.”
Dungeon Siege was intended, from the start, to take the RPG formula and distil it into a pure adrenalin action fest. Taylor says, “I wanted more action and automation of the boring parts. It’s arguable that I took this too far, but that was our focus all along,” and Hallford endorses this. “Chris’s argument was that gamers don’t generally read what they’re shown and he wanted it to be quick-quick-quick. It’s then a matter of matching the narrative style to the play style, and I think for Dungeon Siege it was the right move.” For the background story, Hallford drew from the dark and gritty world that Taylor and his colleagues had begun to create. “So for inspiration I turned to the master of gritty, military fantasy, Glen Cook,” he explains. “There’s a lot of Cook’s feel in Dungeon Siege, especially if you get down to the substrata of the world history I created.” Hallford also drew on the legends of the Romans stranded in Britain after the retreat of their empire. “It’s a theme that comes up in a lot of my work, the idea of a civilisation that gets left behind, and that’s the same with the Kingdom of Ehb. It’s the leftover from the recession of a great empire known as the Kingdom of the Stars.”
The small size of Gas Powered Games proved to be a double-edge sword. “We absolutely benefitted from being able to make decisions quicker,” recalls Taylor. “But the flip side was that we overstretched ourselves in every way. The engine, the size of the world, the huge amount of content. We worked almost every single day for the entire development and often 12-14 hours a day at that. Looking back, it was totally insane.” Part of the team’s ambition was the massive amount of content they were attempting to cram into Dungeon Siege. Taylor continues, “We had to develop a way to automatically test all this content because there was no way we would ever have enough testers available to us. These would run for days, sending scripted characters through the world, hacking and slashing everything they could find. It was actually hilarious to watch the screen as these robots ran at high speed, emulating the player.” Amusement aside, the testing and issues with the engine would be the main reason why Dungeon Siege took so long to deliver. “It was a little more than four years in development,” says Taylor painfully.
Surprisingly, despite the long working hours and the close proximity of the team, people issues, while a natural part of the process, were no better or worse on Dungeon Siege. This was due in no small part to Taylor’s trust in the people he employed, as Hallford recalls. “I have to say Chris left me pretty much alone to do my thing after having told me up front what he wanted. He trusted me and that’s a real rarity in the industry. Unsurprisingly, the games I’ve been most acclaimed for are the ones where the bosses got out of my way and let me do what I’m best at. Chris understood that.” Another example of this trust was with Dungeon Siege’s evocative music from composer Jeremy Soule. “My trust with Jeremy was pretty high after we had such a great time working on Total Annihilation,” smiles Taylor, “And I knew he knew what he was doing. When I first heard the music I was thrilled.”
Chris Taylor and his team were pleased with their results, but as always with game development, there were things that didn’t quite go to plan. “We were never completely satisfied with the AI,” he muses. “As it was always a lot dumber than I wanted it to be.” Given the fast pace that Taylor always had in mind for Dungeon Siege, this was a key element. “We were very mindful of making the AI too smart, because then the game plays very differently, has a slower pace and appeals to a different audience.” Traditional RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate often relied upon drawing out enemies, or taking them out one-by-one, a tactic that, like Taylor says, slows down the pace of the game. But the one omission he truly regrets is the absence of general purpose teleporters: “We just couldn’t find a way to create them. We had our cool fixed portals, but couldn’t drop those dynamically into the world. It bugged me a lot, and I think the game suffered because of it.” Certainly anyone who has spent a length of time trooping around Ehb, may agree. “We just ran out of time.” says Taylor, sadly.
Of course, by now the Gas Powered Games chief had already secured a publisher in fledgling PC games producer Microsoft. “It was weird as I didn’t expect such a positive reaction and most publishers liked the idea and wanted to publish the game,” he says modestly. “But in the end I chose Microsoft because Ed Fries personally reached out to me and told me how excited they were to expand into the PC games business.” Strangely, considering the role Microsoft had to play in Dungeon Siege, an Xbox version never saw the light of day. “I do recall a discussion on it but it never went far,” says Taylor. “I think the game was just too huge for consoles back then. And today it’s different, but back then there was doubt about the audience as well.” Upon release, Dungeon Siege was a decent hit although as Taylor knowingly concedes, “Games back then needed to sell much more than million copies to make it an interesting business. We only barely crossed the interesting line.”
Designer Neal Hallford had plenty of confidence prior to release. “Between all the technical innovations, mechanics and amazing graphics, it was just a hell of a lot of fun to play. And also, because it opened up the toolset, it kept the player base very invested in expanding and extending the life of the product.” Like Total Annihilation before it, Taylor insisted on ensuring a modification community would build up around Dungeon Siege like it had his hit RTS game. “I’ve always been a huge supporter of the modding community, and we spent a fortune in development to get those tools and the documentation created.”
Ultimately, given the ambition of the project and how different it was to be running his own studio, Taylor concedes he learned much from the development of Dungeon Siege. “I have mostly good memories, and yes, I learned a lot. Some of it was about software development and some of it was on managing teams and working with a publisher. I also learned a lot about tax planning, banking and legal, more than I ever would as a pure game developer.” After the success of Total Annihilation, Taylor’s decision to leave and set up a new company may have seemed foolhardy, yet it paid off. “My advice is, if you are thinking about starting your own company to design your ultimate game, then do it!” he grins, although not without a caveat. “But before you do, work inside a company for ten years or so to learn as much as you can first. I wouldn’t have survived without the knowledge I learned at Electronic Arts and Humongous Entertainment or Cavedog.” For Hallford, the importance of Dungeon Siege can never be overstated given the way it pushed technological boundaries and set new standards for what people could expect from an RPG experience.
“It really was a game-changer in terms of all the things it achieved technically and mechanically and was the first game I worked on that sold more than a million copies. I still have the golden plaque that I received from Gas Powered Games hanging in my office. I’m really proud to have had my part in making it happen.”
